15 ms·

Google embraces, extends, and extinguishes

313 points by Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

GoToRO 9y ago
Any company that grows this big will behave the same. The only solution for consumers is to not create companies this big. Always also buy from competitors.
- ribchinski 9y ago
  Any company this big needs to have some outside control. They are clearly monopolizing. I thought the US had a law against monopolies, or does it only apply to the railroads?
  - TulliusCicero 9y ago
    > I thought the US had a law against monopolies, It's more complicated than that. US law tries to only target "bad monopolies" that engage in anti-competitive practices or hurt consumers: https://www.investopedia.com/insights/history-of-us-monopolies/ https://www.investopedia.com/insights/history-of-us-monopoli...
    - jacksmith21006 9y ago
      Two things different in the US. First, monopolies are defined by harm to a consumer. Second, monopolies in the US are NOT illegal but certain behaviors when you have a monopoly are.
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      In reality, monopolies like Google have repeatedly demonstrated anti-competitive practices and consumer harm. The unspoken reality is: We simply don't do antitrust anymore.
  - lallysingh 9y ago
    Monopoly on what? google.com? Android? Google's power comes from its (a) technical prowess and (b) popularity of some of its products. Many of their products get a large advantage just from being on their own internal platform. But I can't think of a product of theirs that doesn't have a strong competitor. Search is the strongest they have, and the underlying problem's getting a bit simpler (I believe it's substantially cheaper now to pay for the infrastructure for a good-enough web crawler than it used to be), and competitors give pretty good results as well. I'm a bit surprised Apple hasn't tried going after this beachhead yet. Android can be avoided by using an iPhone. I can get an email account for free nearly anywhere. Every ISP I've had in the last 20 yrs has given me one (that I don't use). Google's got a lot of influence, and I think AMP is quite the overreach, but they don't fit in the monopoly bucket. If you want, it's pretty easy and reasonable to avoid using them. At least as consumer -- I can't speak as an advertiser. But I don't have a lot of sympathy for advertisers.
    - dmitriid 9y ago
      Google have monopoly on search (up to 90% in some markets). So anything they do with AMP is anti-competitive, for example. Google have monopoly on business email, close 85% if you trust reports from Datanyze [1]. And now they are pushing AMP for email with exactly 0 external input [2][3] [1] https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting/gmail-for-business-market-share# https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting/gmail-fo... [2] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597 [3] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13623 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13623
      - lallysingh 9y ago
        Dominant market share != Monopoly. > the exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service. "his likely motive was to protect his regional monopoly on furs"
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    The conception of antitrust regulation has gradually evolved into the idea that if it doesn't directly lead to higher prices for consumers it's harmless, which is a much stricter standard than was applied in periods of vigorous trustbusting.
    - jacksmith21006 9y ago
      Exactly in the US. Both Dems and Repubs base on the consumer being harmed. That would have to change first. I have my doubts. Repubs do NOT want regulations. Dems and SV are pretty tight.
      - emodendroket 9y ago
        You'd probably have to have different people in office, yes.
        jacksmith21006 9y ago
        Think it will take more than new people. Take a fundamental change in the US.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  i.e., not really a solution, because a consumer doesn't have that much influence. Without a government devoted to pursuing antitrust cases it just won't happen.
- majani 9y ago
  Unfortunately Google and Microsoft tend to make their money from solving hard tech problems, which results in natural monopolies or duopolies.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    I would argue Google and Microsoft make their money out of making tech problems seem hard. As noted: In the 90s your Pentium III could do speech recognition, but now nobody believes you can do speech recognition without the cloud. And plastering ads over everything also is not super hard.
ashleyn 9y ago
Google's approach to open source does feel very much like virtue signaling rather than constructive adherence to the ideology. The build system for any Google project is notoriously terrible. I recently attempted to build Skia; even after rereading the scant instructions, I could not get it to do anything better than a compilation error.
- Boulth 9y ago
  I think this stems from their internal monorepo culture, e.g. they care about building everything in one go, not in isolation. This can also explain the issues with golang dependencies, it's hard for them to see problems of most regular developers as they use a unique toolchain (custom SCM, custom build tools etc.)
  - ethbro 9y ago
    Not Invented Here (tm) seems like a large part of the cultural problem with being better open source contributors. It's great they open source a lot of their stuff, but just because you're big enough as a company to rewrite {component of build chain} for yourselves... doesn't mean you should. Caveat: I know parts of Google are awesome with contributions and using standards.
    - iaml 9y ago
      Biggest problem I think is googlers can't use code if it's licensed under AGPL. edit: GPL -> AGPL
      - plantain 9y ago
        Not true. Ex-googler.
      - skj 9y ago
        The license we (I am an engineer at Google) cannot use is the AGPL.
      - mmirate 9y ago
jjhbw 9y ago
I wonder if their attempt to force HTTPS everywhere (by shaming HTTP-only sites as insecure in Chrome) fits into this strategy. It would put net neutrality violators like US ISPs out of the mass surveilla- ..eeeh advertising business, so I guess that is a good thing.
- Cursuviam 9y ago
  I feel this one is highly positive enough to give them leeway. There are many types of browsing data, my porn habits as an egregious example, that I would prefer be constrained to a minimum number of entities.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
  Think driven to keep people safer and the same with Project Zero. A safer digital world and people will use more and Google then makes more money. My gripe with the broader industry is that Google is finding a lot more of the big vulnerabilities than their competitors. Should be a lot more balanced. I can not even think of one major one found by Apple. Yet Google has found so many of the really big ones. Today see an article they found additional.
  - crummy 9y ago
    What exactly should Google do differently here, when they find bugs in other companies products?
    - jacksmith21006 9y ago
      The point is spending the money to find them. I personally believe MS should have done this years before Google.
superflyguy 9y ago
Am I missing something here? Just seems like moaning. And the irony of the link on the side of the page to a Minecraft clone that's been embraced, extended and then abandoned because the author just can't be bothered any more (but you can send him money and maybe he'll change his mind) isn't lost on me.
- titzer 9y ago
  > link on the side of the page to a Minecraft clone that's been embraced, extended and then abandoned I'm not sure how a person doing a clone of something owned by a billion dollar corporation (Microsoft)...and then giving up on it...is the same thing. At all.
- bigtones 9y ago
  Agreed, this seems like moaning and does not contribute anything.
- Quarrelsome 9y ago
  slander. Attack the content, not the author.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  I don't think TrueCraft's history is at all comparible to embrace/extend/extinguish, nor does it make Google's behavior excusable if it were.
jahvo 9y ago
>The “extinguish” with GMail is also well underway - it’s infamous for having an extremely strict spam filter for incoming emails from people who run personal or niche mail servers And thank God for that. That's why their antispam is sooo good.
- akerl_ 9y ago
  Yup. Between the spam filtering and their Inbox mobile app, I now actually have an email experience that doesn't make me dread incoming messages.
- sdoering 9y ago
  Exactly. Because enforcing monopolies like that is a good thing? Isn't it?
  - jahvo 9y ago
    Gmail won because it fixed the biggest pain points with HTML email and spam. And so many years later nobody has come even close. That's not their fault.
    - ubernostrum 9y ago
      And now you get to wonder what ideas people might have come up with, that you'd have loved, but got shut down immediately because Google doesn't let people break in with new ideas. Being the best available option is good. Using a dominant position to try to ensure nobody is ever allowed to compete with you again in the future is bad, and in theory illegal.
      - lallysingh 9y ago
        How would this play out in email? Users can have more than 1 email account, and even just forward from their old acct to their new one.
        9y ago
nova22033 9y ago
>and contributing to Chromium as a non-Googler is notoriously difficult. so fork?
- takluyver 9y ago
  Forking a big, fast moving, security critical piece of software like a browser is totally impractical unless you have a sizable company behind you to maintain it.
  - lallysingh 9y ago
    It's probably easier to just keep a set of diffs.
    - takluyver 9y ago
      Even maintaining a patch against a rapidly changing codebase takes work, and then you've got to make builds. This is why people contribute changes upstream rather than everyone maintaining their own modified version of every application and library.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    So what? Lots of things are impractical for individuals.
    - guiolo 9y ago
      It's not just individuals. If people can't contribute to the project it is hard to build or maintain knowledge about that technology so another party can use it at all. Sharing code that few people de facto can use shouldn't give you much credit, or at least not as much as the alternative. Unless it is, as someone suggested, about signaling.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  [edit: Moved here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16994356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16994356]
SquareWheel 9y ago
To my memory Gmail has always had a very strict spam filter. At what point did it turn into "extinguish"?
- lallysingh 9y ago
  The complaint is that they're extending the email standard by sending single-URL bodies instead of the messages inline. I can see the point, but sending URLs is still fine in my book, and this is a useful feature that's trying to get parity with Outlook.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Including not being able to read them when using a 3rd party client?
    - SquareWheel 9y ago
      If it's just a URL, why wouldn't that work in other email clients? (Though personally I'm not a fan of the idea itself)
      - pjmlp 9y ago
        Outlook has a way to send such messages that you only see a Webmail.dat attachment when using other clients, hence why I was jokingly asking if that was also part of achieving parity.
        SquareWheel 9y ago
        Ah, missed that sorry. Thankfully haven't received such a file yet.
  - Lionsion 9y ago
    > The complaint is that they're extending the email standard by sending single-URL bodies instead of the messages inline. Someone needs to write a client to recognize the gmail, single-URL, bodies and archive the content with the messages.
akerl_ 9y ago
They're extinguishing all the parts of the web that I didn't like: email spam, slow web page loads on mobile devices, etc. Hope they keep up the good work.
- gcp 9y ago
  slow web page loads on mobile devices Mostly slow because they need to display a lot of...Google Ads?
jacksmith21006 9y ago
This is a very goofy article. Google has open source so many things that it is a bit crazy they give away. But who else open sources their OSs? Both Android and ChromeOS. But the craziest one is giving away Borg. Probably the most incredible technology Google has created and just opens sources it. For me personally the biggest contribution from Google is https://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html https://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html Kind of the opposite of what this article suggests. I get some of the alt right has a problem with Google firing Damore but this article is ridiculous, IMO.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  > Both Android and ChromeOS. Which are only kind of open sourced. Google only makes the lower levels available and both are designed in such a way that using Linux as kernel is largely irrelevant for anyone using the OS SDKs. ChromeOS is mostly a Web browser juggler and as such the only way to develop for it is with the standard Web platform APIs. Android is all about Google's version of Java, with plain ANSI C, C++ and a couple of native APIs on the NDK, everything else is not white listed as official NDK API and as of Android 7 trying to link to them will cause an application termination.
- MikusR 9y ago
  Neither Android nor ChromeOS are open source. Only parts of them are.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- virgilp 9y ago
  You could've skipped the last paragraph as it adds nothing to the discussion.
  - nukeop 9y ago
    It reveals the poster's affiliation, which is pretty important in assessing the usefulness of his post
kmfrk 9y ago
I think Google are just terrible at product, plain and simple. I just looked at the new YouTube Creator Studio interface, and it's literally the biggest UI and UX abomination I've seen from a major tech company in recent memory. It's worse than the iOS 7 redesign.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
  Depends on the product. We just got YouTube TV and just love it and same with Google Photos. But then there are other Google products that are poor and been for years. They are now a pretty big company with a lot of different teams so not surprising some good and some bad.
  - kmfrk 9y ago
    It’s weird, because Google clearly have great designers and do some great work, but YouTube (as an uploader) is just the worst. It’s great that YouTube for PS4 sorta works now, though. I do wonder why there’s this crazy variance in quality.
    - jacksmith21006 8y ago
      Must use difference teams for YouTube versus YouTube TV. YouTube TV is excellent.
- monetus 9y ago
  I recently saw a relative yell at their computer, as the chromecast popup menu grabbed the mouse focus and they couldn't pause the youtube video. I'm not impressed with their decisions in regards to UX.
chatmasta 9y ago
Hey, I was just talking about this in a comment the other day! I totally agree with the author here. I was surprised not to see any mention of cloud facing open source products. Kubernetes seems like a prime example. Google lost its containerization first mover advantage to Docker (remember google was famous early for its internal use of containers). So they targeted the next level up the stack of container orchestration. Kubernetes is a great project, but its clear priority is compatibility with the cloud computing business model. It didn’t take long for google to offer GKE on top of kubernetes. At least for now, there is feature parity between open source and hosted versions. But I don’t expect that to last long. I would be wary of the kubernetes project introducing features that only work well in google’s cloud. The main externality of this open source EEE strategy is developer opportunity cost. When google swept into the chat market, they used their size and first mover advantage to push an open standard, XMPP. So developers who might have worked on other projects/standards naturally gravitated toward XMPP and contributed their time there. If those developers had known the future of XMPP, they likely would not have worked on it. They could have invested time in a competing, more open project instead. This to me is the real danger. It’s bad enough that google gets to benefit from thousands of free contributors to its “open source” code. It’s even worse that they are taking those developers away from other projects, so that when google moves to the third phase of EEE, there are no viable alternatives.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
  Google completely gave away K8s including even the brand. So not sure what you think Google will do? They are giving away everything they learned with Borg and you somehow take it as a negative? Really? Do think from a business standpoint not sure why Google would give up the K8s brand but it is good for everyone. I really worry that Google will stop opens sourcing and more important sharing so much through papers when people b*tch so much. Starting to be hard to see why they even do it any longer. Who else have a huge competitive advantage with something like Borg and just gives it away to the industry? But I am someone super curious and just probably spend more time on https://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html https://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html Read most of the paper. But then what they presented at NIPS. My favorite paper right now is https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01208 https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01208 Bigger example is how much they give away in terms of AI/ML.
shmerl 9y ago
> These days, Microsoft seems to have turned the other leaf, contributing to a huge amount of open source and supporting open standards, and is becoming a good citizen of the technology community. In some cases, but not in others. MS never joined the Vulkan working group, instead insisting on its DirectX lock-in. MS's Outlook / ActiveSync is still not an open standard which makes it a major pain to use. exFAT isn't an open standard despite MS pushing it on SD cards storage. And so on and so forth. And XMPP story isn't any better either. Google should be blamed of course for deserting, but so is MS who never joined the effort to begin with.
Mediterraneo10 9y ago
> it’s infamous for having an extremely strict spam filter for incoming emails from people who run personal or niche mail servers. I run my own mail server and I have zero problems with reaching Google Mail users. Google – like other big mail providers – just expects you to set up DMARC and DKIM authentication for your server, which is not hard to do. Linode already provides a convenient guide to setting this up for any Ubuntu or Debian installation.
throwawaymanbot 9y ago
By adding to the kernel etc, is this not part of their embrace/extend methodology. Then after, it extinguishes? Dont trust MS. They Changed due to revenue, not due to culture.
aceon48 9y ago
AMP's point isn't to "reward" faster pages. The mobile web is garbage and 80% of pages are hot dumpster UX fires that take several second to load. AMP's point is to help standardize the excellence of the few pages that actually are performant. Any rankings boost was a carrot for early adopters. In july, page speed will have greater importantance ranking for pages generally.
tehabe 9y ago
There are also a view counterexamples, for example that Google abandoned its native client in favour of webassembly when the standard took form. The same with progressive web apps which will replace the "web apps" in Chrome. I was also sad when Google Talk was shutdown for Hangouts but to be honest, XMPP was going nowhere. The quality of available clients was very different. You had awful clients like Apple iChat (which is still awful), complete client like Psi which stopped at some point, clients which wanted to be everything like Adium/Pidgin, etc. pp. Google Reader was indeed sad and really weird, they could have build on top of their social networks they already had but they wanted something new and shiny. I still look for a good replacement.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
  The Google Reader one is so baffling and love to hear the real story at some point.
  - ebikelaw 9y ago
    Boring story. Vic Gundotra, the clueless jackass from Microsoft that Google made SVP for Social did not think RSS fit into his idiotic vision so he shut it off.
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    Google Reader was a product in decline with low usage numbers and revenue, and it really wasn't aligned with the way the world/web was headed, this made it hard to retain engineers on the project since it was a career dead end. We all have a soft spot in our hearts for Reader, but the world has largely moved on to algorithmic feeds, because that's what most users want. Most users are intimidated by the fact that you have to find people to follow on Twitter, let alone find RSS feeds.
- Boulth 9y ago
  W.r.t. XMPP have you seen https://Conversations.im https://Conversations.im or https://dino.im https://dino.im? I'm using the former daily and the experience is very good, it's a modern messanger. Hangouts is stuck in the past.
gmenegatti 9y ago
This is true, not just for technical side, but also on business side. Google just did it again on the Ads business: https://adexchanger.com/online-advertising/googles-gdpr-consent-tool-will-limit-publishers-to-12-ad-tech-vendors/ https://adexchanger.com/online-advertising/googles-gdpr-cons...
minikites 9y ago
Does Gmail still cause trouble with vanilla IMAP clients? I remember something about how "tags" in Gmail showed up as folders in the client, but since emails could have multiple tags it caused lots of problems. (I use Fastmail, an email service that's much better and standards compliant.)
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  It does. Deleting things in an IMAP client usually means "removing the tag corresponding with that folder" in Gmail. There's a hilarious tendency for things you delete in IMAP to just be in "All Mail" with no labels in Gmail, for instance. I used to use Gmail on a Windows phone for a while, and the issues were painful. Note that FastMail is developing JMAP, a replacement standard for IMAP. And even though FastMail itself doesn't support labels, they've made sure their new standard can support Gmail's currently proprietary way of handling mail correctly. Hopefully JMAP will take off and we'll see better email clients in the future.
  - shmerl 9y ago
    You need to configure your client to do expunge in addition to delete.
nukeop 9y ago
Google gets 97% of its income from selling ads and analytics, everything else they do or produce exists only to serve this goal and to strengthen their monopoly and entrench their position even further. A browser to dictate internet standards so they can push towards more surveillance, a mobile operating system so they can control most of the world's mobile devices with an iron fist, email service and cloud storage platform so they can get better profiling data and so on. Any code that is shared for free under the guise of "open sourcing" is most of the time either a byproduct of their internal research that will not lose any value by sharing it (or will actually make non-employees extend it and work on it for free for Google's benefit), or something so specific to the company that nobody stands to gain anything from adopting it. Google is first and foremost an advertising and user profiling company, it is useful to think about them from this perspective as it explains most of their actions with perfect clarity.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
  Actually 88% but close.
  - nukeop 9y ago
    At their size it's hard to estimate but it's definitely in the 90% range. I've seen estimates of 85-99% of revenue coming from advertising.
    - singron 9y ago
      You don't have to estimate it. They put the actual number in their earnings report.
      - jacksmith21006 9y ago
        They do on revenues but not for earnings.
crispyporkbites 9y ago
This does feel like a familiar turning point for google- how long until they are the slow moving incumbent in the market and ripe for disruption? If you’re thinking about taking on google in a specific product area, now is probably a good time to start.
- scarface74 9y ago
  An ad blocker + reader view could very well take care of most slow loading web pages. What are the chances that Google will build an infrastructure that allows third party ad blockers to work with Chrome on Android? Yes I know that you can download other browsers,but embedded web views still use Chrome.
  - romanovcode 9y ago
    Google is experimenting with putting ad content seamless together with regular search results so an ad-blocker will not help you at all.
    - scarface74 9y ago
      It's not about as blocking on Google. It's about the ads on third party sites (including Google ads) that make the web so obnoxious.
yoz-y 9y ago
One thing I would add is constantly pushing the web standards forward with little regard to other players. They are adding features so fast that only the biggest structures can keep up. Many of these seem to exist just so ChromeOS can actually be considered a real OS. Writing a secure and up to date HTML rendering engine from ground up is now almost impossible (kudos to Mozilla to actually doing that).
- zzzcpan 9y ago
  Yeah, web standards and the whole Chrome browser is a prime example of embrace, extend, extinguish strategy from Google.
  - oscargrouch 9y ago
    In the case of browser it would become: embrace, extend til no one else can keep up without expending a lot on it, kill competitors that do not have the pockets to follow up and monopolize
- gcp 9y ago
  The problem is that they push "standards" but the implementation of the standards often does not function as written. Typically standard bodies avoid this by requiring two independent implementations, but the market situation really means that the standard is what Chrome implements, and nothing else.
  - romanovcode 9y ago
    They also ignore many things they push.
- dontchooseanick 9y ago
  Have you noticed how <custom-elements />, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Components https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Components, have become google web fundamentals, see https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/web-components/customelements https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/web-component.... Nobody discusses v1 vs v2, x-tags vs webcomponents polyfills even though mozilla had it right (all-in-one js vs typed sub-sections like shadow DOM) Having worked on both XMPP and CustomElements I couldn't agree more. Gosh, I've even already written on the quasi-impossibility to use Android as a non-google open-source system, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14516538&p=2#14526788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14516538&p=2#14526788 So kudos to Mozilla once again, they're the one pushing real FOSS
hapnin 9y ago
In 1998, Brin and Page admitted that the future Google would biased and poor quality: “The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.” “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” “Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.” “Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who “deserves” to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed.” http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
quantumwoke 9y ago
This article reminded me of an old quote from J Allard, a former exec from Microsoft. Replace Microsoft/Windows with Google, and the result is scarily accurate. "In order to build the necessary respect and win the mindshare of the Internet community, I recommend a recipe not unlike the one we've used with our TCP/IP efforts: embrace, extend, then innovate. Phase 1 (Embrace): all participants need to establish a solid understanding of the infostructure and the community — determine the needs and the trends of the user base. Only then can we effectively enable Microsoft system products to be great Internet systems. Phase 2 (Extend): establish relationships with the appropriate organizations and corporations with goals similar to ours. Offer well-integrated tools and services compatible with established and popular standards that have been developed in the Internet community. Phase 3 (Innovate): move into a leadership role with new Internet standards as appropriate, enable standard off-the-shelf titles with Internet awareness. Change the rules: Windows become the next-generation Internet tool of the future."
davdc 9y ago
Google's approach to open source may be about as transparent as North Korea, but I do appreciate their contributions. VP8 and VP9 never really had any competition in their category, and their collaboration with the AOM to ship AV1 appears to have been fruitful.
- willnorris 9y ago
  Could you expand on this a bit? We've tried to be very transparent with how we approach and think about open source by publishing all of our internal documentation at https://opensource.google.com/docs/ https://opensource.google.com/docs/. Is there something that's missing from that? Or are you thinking about certain specific projects being opaque in terms of how their managed?
  - forgottenpass 9y ago
    The default google approach to open source is unidirectional source dumps after all the work is done. On some products you do a bit better, but still keep your cards incredibly close to the vest, and maintain very tight control. Even when you're trying not to, you can't break from that mold. I've got this comment saved on my reddit account because it was so funny: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/53gb56/why_learning_angular_2_was_excruciating/d7szso5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/53gb56/why_lea...
    - willnorris 9y ago
      > The default google approach to open source is unidirectional source dumps after all the work is done. I can definitely say that is not our default approach to open source; in fact it's a very small minority of projects that actually operate in that fashion. However, I can understand that it could feel that way to some people. We've long said and continue to believe that there is no one way to do open source. That's true of nearly every aspect of a project including licensing, governance, community management, etc. Project are released for different reasons, with different motivations and goals, and so the way they are managed often differs. One area I know we could do better is to set better expectations for projects around many of these topics. How is the project managed, how are decisions made, how committed to this are we (ie. are we using it in production), etc? If those aspects of a given project were clearer, would that address some of your concern (with the understanding that some projects may be be held closer to the vest than others) ? Or are you objecting to the tighter control in general?
gcp 9y ago
Microsoft...is becoming a good citizen of the technology community By displaying deceptive ads about competitors in their flagship product? Get out.
- neilparikh 9y ago
  To be fair, Google did the same thing. When chrome was new, they had banners on google.com suggesting you “upgrade” to Chrome for a better experience. And the banners weren’t only shown on outdated/old browsers (say, IE); they were shown on Firefox too.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    They also show for Edge, of course. And don't go away no matter how many times you dismiss them. Firefox is currently my main browser, and there are only two things left on the Internet which truly annoy me. - "Upgrade to Chrome?" - "Subscribe to YouTube TV?" No matter how many times you say "No", they'll both come back. And you know that's not bad code, because YouTube literally said it was part of business plan to annoy people until they pay up. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/21/17147800/youtube-streaming-service-lyor-cohen-ads-music-industry-spotify-free https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/21/17147800/youtube-streamin...
shouldbew0rking 9y ago
Write more AGPL licensed code ;)
mankash666 9y ago
On open source and standards Google has been a leader. Contributions: 1. VP8, VP9 and 90% of av1 2. WebRTC 3. Nacl/Pnacl that was killed by W3C for no technical reason, in favor of an inferior wasm 4. SpyDy inspiring http2 5. V8 js runtime 6. Angular js 7. ProtoBuf and grpc 8. Android 9. Huge contributions to the looking kernel, and many many open source libraries, like boring ssl 10. Brotli compression and other related tech 11. Go language 12. Tensorflow 13. ... It's a bit sensationalist to label Google an "extinguisher". If anything, they're a huge enabler in software. Now, all the above doesn't make itself. A company pays competent software engineers to work on this full time. I'm in complete support of Google's attempts to monetise Gmail, one of their largest services. After all someone needs to pay for those engineers, and most of all, Google is a for profit enterprise You're free to transition to any of the other million standards compliant providers, there's no data lock-in. You can download your email via imap, another standard that was pushed by Google when the competition was only offering web-email
- craftyguy 9y ago
  > 8. Android Have you tried to build pure AOSP lately? Hint: you pretty much can't, it's broken. Google plays super dirty with manufacturers that want to use Android.
stevensonbaines 8y ago
I'll say you contact Q U A D H A C K E D @ G M A I L . C O M for your equifax, transunion credit repair and expunging of negative remarks from your credit report, he's such a saviour. i just wish i met him much early i wouldn't have suffered for that long. after the whole credit repair . well it took almost a month but i love how progressive the effect of all he did on my credit score was . i will gladly recommend the firm to anyone in need of a credit repair hack. send a message to them on their E-mail. Q U A D H A C K E D @ G M A I L . C O M .. help yourself today so you don' get to the point of desperation like i was .

313 points by Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

Any company that grows this big will behave the same. The only solution for consumers is to not create companies this big. Always also buy from competitors.

ribchinski 9y ago
Any company this big needs to have some outside control. They are clearly monopolizing. I thought the US had a law against monopolies, or does it only apply to the railroads?
- TulliusCicero 9y ago
  > I thought the US had a law against monopolies, It's more complicated than that. US law tries to only target "bad monopolies" that engage in anti-competitive practices or hurt consumers: https://www.investopedia.com/insights/history-of-us-monopolies/ https://www.investopedia.com/insights/history-of-us-monopoli...
  - jacksmith21006 9y ago
    Two things different in the US. First, monopolies are defined by harm to a consumer. Second, monopolies in the US are NOT illegal but certain behaviors when you have a monopoly are.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    In reality, monopolies like Google have repeatedly demonstrated anti-competitive practices and consumer harm. The unspoken reality is: We simply don't do antitrust anymore.
- lallysingh 9y ago
  Monopoly on what? google.com? Android? Google's power comes from its (a) technical prowess and (b) popularity of some of its products. Many of their products get a large advantage just from being on their own internal platform. But I can't think of a product of theirs that doesn't have a strong competitor. Search is the strongest they have, and the underlying problem's getting a bit simpler (I believe it's substantially cheaper now to pay for the infrastructure for a good-enough web crawler than it used to be), and competitors give pretty good results as well. I'm a bit surprised Apple hasn't tried going after this beachhead yet. Android can be avoided by using an iPhone. I can get an email account for free nearly anywhere. Every ISP I've had in the last 20 yrs has given me one (that I don't use). Google's got a lot of influence, and I think AMP is quite the overreach, but they don't fit in the monopoly bucket. If you want, it's pretty easy and reasonable to avoid using them. At least as consumer -- I can't speak as an advertiser. But I don't have a lot of sympathy for advertisers.
  - dmitriid 9y ago
    Google have monopoly on search (up to 90% in some markets). So anything they do with AMP is anti-competitive, for example. Google have monopoly on business email, close 85% if you trust reports from Datanyze [1]. And now they are pushing AMP for email with exactly 0 external input [2][3] [1] https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting/gmail-for-business-market-share# https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting/gmail-fo... [2] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597 [3] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13623 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13623
    - lallysingh 9y ago
      Dominant market share != Monopoly. > the exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service. "his likely motive was to protect his regional monopoly on furs"
- emodendroket 9y ago
  The conception of antitrust regulation has gradually evolved into the idea that if it doesn't directly lead to higher prices for consumers it's harmless, which is a much stricter standard than was applied in periods of vigorous trustbusting.
  - jacksmith21006 9y ago
    Exactly in the US. Both Dems and Repubs base on the consumer being harmed. That would have to change first. I have my doubts. Repubs do NOT want regulations. Dems and SV are pretty tight.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      You'd probably have to have different people in office, yes.
      - jacksmith21006 9y ago
        Think it will take more than new people. Take a fundamental change in the US.
emodendroket 9y ago
i.e., not really a solution, because a consumer doesn't have that much influence. Without a government devoted to pursuing antitrust cases it just won't happen.
majani 9y ago
Unfortunately Google and Microsoft tend to make their money from solving hard tech problems, which results in natural monopolies or duopolies.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  I would argue Google and Microsoft make their money out of making tech problems seem hard. As noted: In the 90s your Pentium III could do speech recognition, but now nobody believes you can do speech recognition without the cloud. And plastering ads over everything also is not super hard.

ashleyn 9y ago

Google's approach to open source does feel very much like virtue signaling rather than constructive adherence to the ideology. The build system for any Google project is notoriously terrible. I recently attempted to build Skia; even after rereading the scant instructions, I could not get it to do anything better than a compilation error.

Boulth 9y ago
I think this stems from their internal monorepo culture, e.g. they care about building everything in one go, not in isolation. This can also explain the issues with golang dependencies, it's hard for them to see problems of most regular developers as they use a unique toolchain (custom SCM, custom build tools etc.)
- ethbro 9y ago
  Not Invented Here (tm) seems like a large part of the cultural problem with being better open source contributors. It's great they open source a lot of their stuff, but just because you're big enough as a company to rewrite {component of build chain} for yourselves... doesn't mean you should. Caveat: I know parts of Google are awesome with contributions and using standards.
  - iaml 9y ago
    Biggest problem I think is googlers can't use code if it's licensed under AGPL. edit: GPL -> AGPL
    - plantain 9y ago
      Not true. Ex-googler.
    - skj 9y ago
      The license we (I am an engineer at Google) cannot use is the AGPL.
    - mmirate 9y ago

jjhbw 9y ago

I wonder if their attempt to force HTTPS everywhere (by shaming HTTP-only sites as insecure in Chrome) fits into this strategy. It would put net neutrality violators like US ISPs out of the mass surveilla- ..eeeh advertising business, so I guess that is a good thing.

Cursuviam 9y ago
I feel this one is highly positive enough to give them leeway. There are many types of browsing data, my porn habits as an egregious example, that I would prefer be constrained to a minimum number of entities.
jacksmith21006 9y ago
Think driven to keep people safer and the same with Project Zero. A safer digital world and people will use more and Google then makes more money. My gripe with the broader industry is that Google is finding a lot more of the big vulnerabilities than their competitors. Should be a lot more balanced. I can not even think of one major one found by Apple. Yet Google has found so many of the really big ones. Today see an article they found additional.
- crummy 9y ago
  What exactly should Google do differently here, when they find bugs in other companies products?
  - jacksmith21006 9y ago
    The point is spending the money to find them. I personally believe MS should have done this years before Google.

superflyguy 9y ago

Am I missing something here? Just seems like moaning. And the irony of the link on the side of the page to a Minecraft clone that's been embraced, extended and then abandoned because the author just can't be bothered any more (but you can send him money and maybe he'll change his mind) isn't lost on me.

titzer 9y ago
> link on the side of the page to a Minecraft clone that's been embraced, extended and then abandoned I'm not sure how a person doing a clone of something owned by a billion dollar corporation (Microsoft)...and then giving up on it...is the same thing. At all.
bigtones 9y ago
Agreed, this seems like moaning and does not contribute anything.
Quarrelsome 9y ago
slander. Attack the content, not the author.
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
I don't think TrueCraft's history is at all comparible to embrace/extend/extinguish, nor does it make Google's behavior excusable if it were.

jahvo 9y ago

>The “extinguish” with GMail is also well underway - it’s infamous for having an extremely strict spam filter for incoming emails from people who run personal or niche mail servers And thank God for that. That's why their antispam is sooo good.

akerl_ 9y ago
Yup. Between the spam filtering and their Inbox mobile app, I now actually have an email experience that doesn't make me dread incoming messages.
sdoering 9y ago
Exactly. Because enforcing monopolies like that is a good thing? Isn't it?
- jahvo 9y ago
  Gmail won because it fixed the biggest pain points with HTML email and spam. And so many years later nobody has come even close. That's not their fault.
  - ubernostrum 9y ago
    And now you get to wonder what ideas people might have come up with, that you'd have loved, but got shut down immediately because Google doesn't let people break in with new ideas. Being the best available option is good. Using a dominant position to try to ensure nobody is ever allowed to compete with you again in the future is bad, and in theory illegal.
    - lallysingh 9y ago
      How would this play out in email? Users can have more than 1 email account, and even just forward from their old acct to their new one.
      - 9y ago

nova22033 9y ago

>and contributing to Chromium as a non-Googler is notoriously difficult. so fork?

takluyver 9y ago
Forking a big, fast moving, security critical piece of software like a browser is totally impractical unless you have a sizable company behind you to maintain it.
- lallysingh 9y ago
  It's probably easier to just keep a set of diffs.
  - takluyver 9y ago
    Even maintaining a patch against a rapidly changing codebase takes work, and then you've got to make builds. This is why people contribute changes upstream rather than everyone maintaining their own modified version of every application and library.
- icebraining 9y ago
  So what? Lots of things are impractical for individuals.
  - guiolo 9y ago
    It's not just individuals. If people can't contribute to the project it is hard to build or maintain knowledge about that technology so another party can use it at all. Sharing code that few people de facto can use shouldn't give you much credit, or at least not as much as the alternative. Unless it is, as someone suggested, about signaling.
scrollaway 9y ago
[edit: Moved here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16994356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16994356]

SquareWheel 9y ago

To my memory Gmail has always had a very strict spam filter. At what point did it turn into "extinguish"?

lallysingh 9y ago
The complaint is that they're extending the email standard by sending single-URL bodies instead of the messages inline. I can see the point, but sending URLs is still fine in my book, and this is a useful feature that's trying to get parity with Outlook.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Including not being able to read them when using a 3rd party client?
  - SquareWheel 9y ago
    If it's just a URL, why wouldn't that work in other email clients? (Though personally I'm not a fan of the idea itself)
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      Outlook has a way to send such messages that you only see a Webmail.dat attachment when using other clients, hence why I was jokingly asking if that was also part of achieving parity.
      - SquareWheel 9y ago
        Ah, missed that sorry. Thankfully haven't received such a file yet.
- Lionsion 9y ago
  > The complaint is that they're extending the email standard by sending single-URL bodies instead of the messages inline. Someone needs to write a client to recognize the gmail, single-URL, bodies and archive the content with the messages.

akerl_ 9y ago

They're extinguishing all the parts of the web that I didn't like: email spam, slow web page loads on mobile devices, etc. Hope they keep up the good work.

gcp 9y ago
slow web page loads on mobile devices Mostly slow because they need to display a lot of...Google Ads?

jacksmith21006 9y ago

This is a very goofy article. Google has open source so many things that it is a bit crazy they give away. But who else open sources their OSs? Both Android and ChromeOS. But the craziest one is giving away Borg. Probably the most incredible technology Google has created and just opens sources it. For me personally the biggest contribution from Google is https://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html https://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html Kind of the opposite of what this article suggests. I get some of the alt right has a problem with Google firing Damore but this article is ridiculous, IMO.

pjmlp 9y ago
> Both Android and ChromeOS. Which are only kind of open sourced. Google only makes the lower levels available and both are designed in such a way that using Linux as kernel is largely irrelevant for anyone using the OS SDKs. ChromeOS is mostly a Web browser juggler and as such the only way to develop for it is with the standard Web platform APIs. Android is all about Google's version of Java, with plain ANSI C, C++ and a couple of native APIs on the NDK, everything else is not white listed as official NDK API and as of Android 7 trying to link to them will cause an application termination.
MikusR 9y ago
Neither Android nor ChromeOS are open source. Only parts of them are.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
virgilp 9y ago
You could've skipped the last paragraph as it adds nothing to the discussion.
- nukeop 9y ago
  It reveals the poster's affiliation, which is pretty important in assessing the usefulness of his post

kmfrk 9y ago

I think Google are just terrible at product, plain and simple. I just looked at the new YouTube Creator Studio interface, and it's literally the biggest UI and UX abomination I've seen from a major tech company in recent memory. It's worse than the iOS 7 redesign.

jacksmith21006 9y ago
Depends on the product. We just got YouTube TV and just love it and same with Google Photos. But then there are other Google products that are poor and been for years. They are now a pretty big company with a lot of different teams so not surprising some good and some bad.
- kmfrk 9y ago
  It’s weird, because Google clearly have great designers and do some great work, but YouTube (as an uploader) is just the worst. It’s great that YouTube for PS4 sorta works now, though. I do wonder why there’s this crazy variance in quality.
  - jacksmith21006 8y ago
    Must use difference teams for YouTube versus YouTube TV. YouTube TV is excellent.
monetus 9y ago
I recently saw a relative yell at their computer, as the chromecast popup menu grabbed the mouse focus and they couldn't pause the youtube video. I'm not impressed with their decisions in regards to UX.

chatmasta 9y ago

Hey, I was just talking about this in a comment the other day! I totally agree with the author here. I was surprised not to see any mention of cloud facing open source products. Kubernetes seems like a prime example. Google lost its containerization first mover advantage to Docker (remember google was famous early for its internal use of containers). So they targeted the next level up the stack of container orchestration. Kubernetes is a great project, but its clear priority is compatibility with the cloud computing business model. It didn’t take long for google to offer GKE on top of kubernetes. At least for now, there is feature parity between open source and hosted versions. But I don’t expect that to last long. I would be wary of the kubernetes project introducing features that only work well in google’s cloud. The main externality of this open source EEE strategy is developer opportunity cost. When google swept into the chat market, they used their size and first mover advantage to push an open standard, XMPP. So developers who might have worked on other projects/standards naturally gravitated toward XMPP and contributed their time there. If those developers had known the future of XMPP, they likely would not have worked on it. They could have invested time in a competing, more open project instead. This to me is the real danger. It’s bad enough that google gets to benefit from thousands of free contributors to its “open source” code. It’s even worse that they are taking those developers away from other projects, so that when google moves to the third phase of EEE, there are no viable alternatives.

jacksmith21006 9y ago
Google completely gave away K8s including even the brand. So not sure what you think Google will do? They are giving away everything they learned with Borg and you somehow take it as a negative? Really? Do think from a business standpoint not sure why Google would give up the K8s brand but it is good for everyone. I really worry that Google will stop opens sourcing and more important sharing so much through papers when people b*tch so much. Starting to be hard to see why they even do it any longer. Who else have a huge competitive advantage with something like Borg and just gives it away to the industry? But I am someone super curious and just probably spend more time on https://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html https://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html Read most of the paper. But then what they presented at NIPS. My favorite paper right now is https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01208 https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01208 Bigger example is how much they give away in terms of AI/ML.

shmerl 9y ago

> These days, Microsoft seems to have turned the other leaf, contributing to a huge amount of open source and supporting open standards, and is becoming a good citizen of the technology community. In some cases, but not in others. MS never joined the Vulkan working group, instead insisting on its DirectX lock-in. MS's Outlook / ActiveSync is still not an open standard which makes it a major pain to use. exFAT isn't an open standard despite MS pushing it on SD cards storage. And so on and so forth. And XMPP story isn't any better either. Google should be blamed of course for deserting, but so is MS who never joined the effort to begin with.

Mediterraneo10 9y ago

> it’s infamous for having an extremely strict spam filter for incoming emails from people who run personal or niche mail servers. I run my own mail server and I have zero problems with reaching Google Mail users. Google – like other big mail providers – just expects you to set up DMARC and DKIM authentication for your server, which is not hard to do. Linode already provides a convenient guide to setting this up for any Ubuntu or Debian installation.

throwawaymanbot 9y ago

By adding to the kernel etc, is this not part of their embrace/extend methodology. Then after, it extinguishes? Dont trust MS. They Changed due to revenue, not due to culture.

aceon48 9y ago

AMP's point isn't to "reward" faster pages. The mobile web is garbage and 80% of pages are hot dumpster UX fires that take several second to load. AMP's point is to help standardize the excellence of the few pages that actually are performant. Any rankings boost was a carrot for early adopters. In july, page speed will have greater importantance ranking for pages generally.

tehabe 9y ago

There are also a view counterexamples, for example that Google abandoned its native client in favour of webassembly when the standard took form. The same with progressive web apps which will replace the "web apps" in Chrome. I was also sad when Google Talk was shutdown for Hangouts but to be honest, XMPP was going nowhere. The quality of available clients was very different. You had awful clients like Apple iChat (which is still awful), complete client like Psi which stopped at some point, clients which wanted to be everything like Adium/Pidgin, etc. pp. Google Reader was indeed sad and really weird, they could have build on top of their social networks they already had but they wanted something new and shiny. I still look for a good replacement.

jacksmith21006 9y ago
The Google Reader one is so baffling and love to hear the real story at some point.
- ebikelaw 9y ago
  Boring story. Vic Gundotra, the clueless jackass from Microsoft that Google made SVP for Social did not think RSS fit into his idiotic vision so he shut it off.
- Eridrus 9y ago
  Google Reader was a product in decline with low usage numbers and revenue, and it really wasn't aligned with the way the world/web was headed, this made it hard to retain engineers on the project since it was a career dead end. We all have a soft spot in our hearts for Reader, but the world has largely moved on to algorithmic feeds, because that's what most users want. Most users are intimidated by the fact that you have to find people to follow on Twitter, let alone find RSS feeds.
Boulth 9y ago
W.r.t. XMPP have you seen https://Conversations.im https://Conversations.im or https://dino.im https://dino.im? I'm using the former daily and the experience is very good, it's a modern messanger. Hangouts is stuck in the past.

gmenegatti 9y ago

This is true, not just for technical side, but also on business side. Google just did it again on the Ads business: https://adexchanger.com/online-advertising/googles-gdpr-consent-tool-will-limit-publishers-to-12-ad-tech-vendors/ https://adexchanger.com/online-advertising/googles-gdpr-cons...

minikites 9y ago

Does Gmail still cause trouble with vanilla IMAP clients? I remember something about how "tags" in Gmail showed up as folders in the client, but since emails could have multiple tags it caused lots of problems. (I use Fastmail, an email service that's much better and standards compliant.)

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
It does. Deleting things in an IMAP client usually means "removing the tag corresponding with that folder" in Gmail. There's a hilarious tendency for things you delete in IMAP to just be in "All Mail" with no labels in Gmail, for instance. I used to use Gmail on a Windows phone for a while, and the issues were painful. Note that FastMail is developing JMAP, a replacement standard for IMAP. And even though FastMail itself doesn't support labels, they've made sure their new standard can support Gmail's currently proprietary way of handling mail correctly. Hopefully JMAP will take off and we'll see better email clients in the future.
- shmerl 9y ago
  You need to configure your client to do expunge in addition to delete.

nukeop 9y ago

Google gets 97% of its income from selling ads and analytics, everything else they do or produce exists only to serve this goal and to strengthen their monopoly and entrench their position even further. A browser to dictate internet standards so they can push towards more surveillance, a mobile operating system so they can control most of the world's mobile devices with an iron fist, email service and cloud storage platform so they can get better profiling data and so on. Any code that is shared for free under the guise of "open sourcing" is most of the time either a byproduct of their internal research that will not lose any value by sharing it (or will actually make non-employees extend it and work on it for free for Google's benefit), or something so specific to the company that nobody stands to gain anything from adopting it. Google is first and foremost an advertising and user profiling company, it is useful to think about them from this perspective as it explains most of their actions with perfect clarity.

jacksmith21006 9y ago
Actually 88% but close.
- nukeop 9y ago
  At their size it's hard to estimate but it's definitely in the 90% range. I've seen estimates of 85-99% of revenue coming from advertising.
  - singron 9y ago
    You don't have to estimate it. They put the actual number in their earnings report.
    - jacksmith21006 9y ago
      They do on revenues but not for earnings.

crispyporkbites 9y ago

This does feel like a familiar turning point for google- how long until they are the slow moving incumbent in the market and ripe for disruption? If you’re thinking about taking on google in a specific product area, now is probably a good time to start.

scarface74 9y ago
An ad blocker + reader view could very well take care of most slow loading web pages. What are the chances that Google will build an infrastructure that allows third party ad blockers to work with Chrome on Android? Yes I know that you can download other browsers,but embedded web views still use Chrome.
- romanovcode 9y ago
  Google is experimenting with putting ad content seamless together with regular search results so an ad-blocker will not help you at all.
  - scarface74 9y ago
    It's not about as blocking on Google. It's about the ads on third party sites (including Google ads) that make the web so obnoxious.

yoz-y 9y ago

One thing I would add is constantly pushing the web standards forward with little regard to other players. They are adding features so fast that only the biggest structures can keep up. Many of these seem to exist just so ChromeOS can actually be considered a real OS. Writing a secure and up to date HTML rendering engine from ground up is now almost impossible (kudos to Mozilla to actually doing that).

zzzcpan 9y ago
Yeah, web standards and the whole Chrome browser is a prime example of embrace, extend, extinguish strategy from Google.
- oscargrouch 9y ago
  In the case of browser it would become: embrace, extend til no one else can keep up without expending a lot on it, kill competitors that do not have the pockets to follow up and monopolize
gcp 9y ago
The problem is that they push "standards" but the implementation of the standards often does not function as written. Typically standard bodies avoid this by requiring two independent implementations, but the market situation really means that the standard is what Chrome implements, and nothing else.
- romanovcode 9y ago
  They also ignore many things they push.
dontchooseanick 9y ago
Have you noticed how <custom-elements />, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Components https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Components, have become google web fundamentals, see https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/web-components/customelements https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/web-component.... Nobody discusses v1 vs v2, x-tags vs webcomponents polyfills even though mozilla had it right (all-in-one js vs typed sub-sections like shadow DOM) Having worked on both XMPP and CustomElements I couldn't agree more. Gosh, I've even already written on the quasi-impossibility to use Android as a non-google open-source system, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14516538&p=2#14526788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14516538&p=2#14526788 So kudos to Mozilla once again, they're the one pushing real FOSS

hapnin 9y ago

In 1998, Brin and Page admitted that the future Google would biased and poor quality: “The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.” “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” “Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.” “Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who “deserves” to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed.” http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

quantumwoke 9y ago

This article reminded me of an old quote from J Allard, a former exec from Microsoft. Replace Microsoft/Windows with Google, and the result is scarily accurate. "In order to build the necessary respect and win the mindshare of the Internet community, I recommend a recipe not unlike the one we've used with our TCP/IP efforts: embrace, extend, then innovate. Phase 1 (Embrace): all participants need to establish a solid understanding of the infostructure and the community — determine the needs and the trends of the user base. Only then can we effectively enable Microsoft system products to be great Internet systems. Phase 2 (Extend): establish relationships with the appropriate organizations and corporations with goals similar to ours. Offer well-integrated tools and services compatible with established and popular standards that have been developed in the Internet community. Phase 3 (Innovate): move into a leadership role with new Internet standards as appropriate, enable standard off-the-shelf titles with Internet awareness. Change the rules: Windows become the next-generation Internet tool of the future."

davdc 9y ago

Google's approach to open source may be about as transparent as North Korea, but I do appreciate their contributions. VP8 and VP9 never really had any competition in their category, and their collaboration with the AOM to ship AV1 appears to have been fruitful.

willnorris 9y ago
Could you expand on this a bit? We've tried to be very transparent with how we approach and think about open source by publishing all of our internal documentation at https://opensource.google.com/docs/ https://opensource.google.com/docs/. Is there something that's missing from that? Or are you thinking about certain specific projects being opaque in terms of how their managed?
- forgottenpass 9y ago
  The default google approach to open source is unidirectional source dumps after all the work is done. On some products you do a bit better, but still keep your cards incredibly close to the vest, and maintain very tight control. Even when you're trying not to, you can't break from that mold. I've got this comment saved on my reddit account because it was so funny: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/53gb56/why_learning_angular_2_was_excruciating/d7szso5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/53gb56/why_lea...
  - willnorris 9y ago
    > The default google approach to open source is unidirectional source dumps after all the work is done. I can definitely say that is not our default approach to open source; in fact it's a very small minority of projects that actually operate in that fashion. However, I can understand that it could feel that way to some people. We've long said and continue to believe that there is no one way to do open source. That's true of nearly every aspect of a project including licensing, governance, community management, etc. Project are released for different reasons, with different motivations and goals, and so the way they are managed often differs. One area I know we could do better is to set better expectations for projects around many of these topics. How is the project managed, how are decisions made, how committed to this are we (ie. are we using it in production), etc? If those aspects of a given project were clearer, would that address some of your concern (with the understanding that some projects may be be held closer to the vest than others) ? Or are you objecting to the tighter control in general?

gcp 9y ago

Microsoft...is becoming a good citizen of the technology community By displaying deceptive ads about competitors in their flagship product? Get out.

neilparikh 9y ago
To be fair, Google did the same thing. When chrome was new, they had banners on google.com suggesting you “upgrade” to Chrome for a better experience. And the banners weren’t only shown on outdated/old browsers (say, IE); they were shown on Firefox too.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  They also show for Edge, of course. And don't go away no matter how many times you dismiss them. Firefox is currently my main browser, and there are only two things left on the Internet which truly annoy me. - "Upgrade to Chrome?" - "Subscribe to YouTube TV?" No matter how many times you say "No", they'll both come back. And you know that's not bad code, because YouTube literally said it was part of business plan to annoy people until they pay up. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/21/17147800/youtube-streaming-service-lyor-cohen-ads-music-industry-spotify-free https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/21/17147800/youtube-streamin...

shouldbew0rking 9y ago

Write more AGPL licensed code ;)

mankash666 9y ago

On open source and standards Google has been a leader. Contributions: 1. VP8, VP9 and 90% of av1 2. WebRTC 3. Nacl/Pnacl that was killed by W3C for no technical reason, in favor of an inferior wasm 4. SpyDy inspiring http2 5. V8 js runtime 6. Angular js 7. ProtoBuf and grpc 8. Android 9. Huge contributions to the looking kernel, and many many open source libraries, like boring ssl 10. Brotli compression and other related tech 11. Go language 12. Tensorflow 13. ... It's a bit sensationalist to label Google an "extinguisher". If anything, they're a huge enabler in software. Now, all the above doesn't make itself. A company pays competent software engineers to work on this full time. I'm in complete support of Google's attempts to monetise Gmail, one of their largest services. After all someone needs to pay for those engineers, and most of all, Google is a for profit enterprise You're free to transition to any of the other million standards compliant providers, there's no data lock-in. You can download your email via imap, another standard that was pushed by Google when the competition was only offering web-email

craftyguy 9y ago
> 8. Android Have you tried to build pure AOSP lately? Hint: you pretty much can't, it's broken. Google plays super dirty with manufacturers that want to use Android.

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